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DANIEL Radcliffe, the actor who will forever be synonymous with JK Rowling's clean-cut boy wizard, is in talks to defy type-casting to become the perennially unwashed Igor in a revisionist take on Mary Shelley's classic horror story Frankenstein.

The Harry Potter actor, 23, is close to being cast as the pop-eyed, hunchback lab assistant first played by Dwight Frye in the first Frankenstein film in 1931.

Radcliffe, who recently starred in another classic horror story, The Woman In Black, is reportedly nearing a deal with Fox, the studio behind the new Frankenstein film due to be directed by Paul McGuigan with a script from Max Landis (son of American Werewolf in London director John Landis).

The character of Igor did not appear in Shelley's 1823 tale of a monster animated by a strange scientific experiment but the awkward servant character has made regular appearances in cinematic renderings of the story and related parodies.

An Igor character has assisted other fantastical creatures from Count Dracula to Van Helsing.

In 1933 horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum he appeared as the mad museum curator.

The character is also mentioned in 1962 Bobby 'Boris' Pickett song "Monster Mash".

Radcliffe has appeared keen to shake off his boy wizard persona recently starring as the gay bearded Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings.

The film, which depicts the lives of other members of the Beat Generation including Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, is quite explicit, showing Radcliffe having oral sex performed on him in a library and making love to a sailor.

The actor, who has previously played a teenager who is sexually aroused by horses in Equus, said recently that he was "weirded out" by incessant questioning about the sex scenes in Kill Your Darlings.

The straight actor, who is a vocal supporter of gay rights, said: "I don't know why a gay sex scene should be any more shocking than a straight sex scene. Both of them are equally un-shocking."

"People were asking me all these questions about the gay sex scenes. I was like: 'You know I did Equus?' Some people are asking me questions like this is a more shocking subject, which is so strange."